Assuring Safety of Building Envelop with Disaster Resistant Glass

Abstract

Urban landscape in today's context exhibits the large scale use of architectural glass in modern building design as it orchestrate bold and brilliant aesthetic statements. The building envelope design practice do not generally considers the potential life safety hazards of falling glass on occurrence of a disaster whether it is a severe earthquake, a hurricane or a terrorist attack. It has been noticed that architectural design, and in the wind engineering field, building codes contain only minimal information regarding the seismic design of architectural glazing systems. In addition to various Physical-chemical properties of such glasses is not commonly known to the architects and planners which limit their potential use in buildings in order to render them safe from disasters. This paper discusses the performance of glass in disasters. The characteristics of various types of glasses which can prove instrumental in assuring safety to the occupants are presented. It is stated that life safety considerations should be considered In selecting right type of glass to check damages, hamper rescue efforts,, disruptions to building operations that can occur when glass breaks during disasters.